Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks

Iain M Banks's novel Use of Weapons has a narrative structure that, if it were not a work of science fiction, would qualify it as the most "literary" of literary fiction. A sequence of numbered chapters (One, Two, Three …) tells the story of a virtuous if inwardly tormented soldier of fortune, Cheradenine Zakalwe, who has been hired by the apparently benevolent "Culture" as its agent. In some far distant future, where interstellar travel is a cinch, he intervenes, often violently, to prevent even worse violence.

An expert with weapons, he is a kind of weapon himself. Recruited by a serenely humorous representative of the Culture called Diziet Sma (the weirdness of everybody's names is a signifier of their remoteness from us in time and space), his main mission is to travel to an obscure planet and kidnap a retired political leader who has the power to prevent an impending galactic war.

Meanwhile, in a second sequence of chapters, headed by Roman numerals in reverse order (XIII, XII, XI …), we are given episodes from Zakalwe's past. Often these appear to be accounts of missions that have taxed to an extreme his capacity to survive. Over many years, he has been burned and blistered and variously wounded in the service of his sublimely distant, apparently all-knowing masters. Occasionally he has taken time out for contemplation, in one episode finding sensual fulfilment with a lover who composes beautiful but unintelligible poetry on some out-of-the-way planet, but he has always come back to fighting.

The two narrative sequences are interleaved, so that the "now" chapters alternate with the "then" chapters. As the former narrative sequence moves onwards with the gusto of an adventure (will he succeed, against the odds, in getting his charge to his destination? How will he be rewarded?) the latter narrative sequence moves further and further backwards in time. There is a design to this, of course, and any skilled reader will infer that these diverging narratives must also be converging.

We know that the climax of the adventure story will not make sense until we have gone far back into the protagonist's past to discover something. And here is the twist: in the last of the conventionally numbered chapters we find out that our hero (brave, rueful, suffering) is not the man we thought he was.

As plain "Iain Banks", our author began his career with The Wasp Factory, a novel whose dénouement brought a shocking twist, in which our assumptions about the protagonist were overturned. Use of Weapons comparably shows us near its conclusion that our beliefs about its main character were wrong. His virtue has its origins in guilt. Yet, though the twist may surprise us (and therefore I cannot say what it is), we surely know that it is coming.

This kind of trick has its literary precedents. Dickens's last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, has a mysterious hero, John Rokesmith, who turns out to be someone different from the person we were told he was. Yet the revelation of his true identity will surprise only an inattentive reader. If a narrative twist is going to be satisfying, it has to be prepared for: pleasure comes from the recognition that we might have guessed, even if we did not. A radical correction of our assumptions must seem planned, not arbitrary.

On the many SF blogs and websites that discuss Banks's fiction, the "fairness" (or otherwise) of the twist at the end of Use of Weapons is hotly debated. His defenders point out that his novel signals its own concealed explanation with its narrative structure. "It was all he could do to keep the memories at bay." The hero's unexplained flashes of memory guide us back to "another time and another place … where four children had played together in a huge and wonderful garden, but had seen their idyll destroyed with gunfire".

The reaching through time is an understandably lengthy process when Zakalwe's own sense of time is peculiarly stretched. By unspecified processes of rejuvenation, he has already lived for hundreds of years, his body parts frequently replaced and his body rejuvenated. (Even being beheaded on one of his missions does not put an end to him: his body is simply "regrown".)

Banks has to give you the sense that his protagonist has had more living – more memories – to burden him than we do. Some of his fragmentary recollections must be clues. (What about his obsession with chairs and people who make chairs? When will this be explained?)

The clue is also in the novel's title. In case we were comfortable with the hero's cheerful relish for military hardware (he is a connoisseur of plasma guns) we find out what has made him the tireless warrior in search of a good cause that he has become. It is all a search for atonement. Men who like weapons have some demon from the past pursuing them.